155 - Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story

    A documentary about Stax Records, the soul label of the 60s and 70's.
    According to IMDB, this is actually an episode of Great Performances, but since it’s very long, and not broken into different episodes… I’m calling this a movie.
    I came out of this with more respect for Stax than I had, which was already considerable.  While Motown put out some very big crossover hits, Stax put out material with less polish, more energy, and more narrow appeal.  I did find a handful of Stax recordings that were clearly intended to ape an existing Motown hit, but those are rare, and kind of charming.
    This documentary focused less on the music, and more on the integrated atmosphere that Stax had.  I honestly didn’t know about this.  Since their market was almost exclusively for a black audience, and most of their artists were obviously black (the exception being Lynda Lyndell, who isn’t mentioned in this documentary) it was easy to assume that they were an exclusively black company.
    I would have liked a better focus on the musicians, but most of this focuses on events, cultural elements, and the business side of Stax.  This is still pretty interesting, and the footage from a massive concert was remarkable.  It explained how important soul music was as a community glue.  This is something missing nowadays… music is too fragmented to be so cohesive a force.
    The business elements aren’t explained in enough detail to be as compelling, but I have the impression that Stax was managed very loosely for awhile, then corruptly for awhile, and both of these combined to make the company insolvent.

154 - World's Greatest Dad

    A teacher has an insufferable 15-year-old son, who accidentally dies of auto-erotic asphyxiation.  The father covers this up by penning a suicide note and doctoring the scene.
    This movie has gotten a lot more attention because it deals with suicide, and it stars Robin Williams.  It’s a shame, because I think it deserves much more attention for the smart script by Bobcat Goldthwait.  I enjoyed God Bless America, although that movie keeps stirring different feelings as you watch it.  This one felt much more uniform, and it’s really strong.
    The son, Kyle, is unbelievable in how broadly he was written.  There isn’t much depth there, but that’s part of the point.  There are a few moments of complete absurdity, but they seem completely believable.  When Kyle claims that he hates music, and that he hates movies, these are things that should be laughable.  Instead, they seem strangely believable.  They paint the kid as an insufferable prick.  Every action that the kid does is so completely reprehensible, and this makes the whole thing work.
    It’s easy to feel like the father is making a mistake by doing what he does, but he gets constant reinforcement from the people surrounding him.
    As a person who fluctuates between being suicidal and being fairly normal, I expected that more of this movie would make me stake sides, but there’s no exploration of suicide.  There is an exploration of the human response to suicide.
    It’s almost as if one of the elements of Heathers was stretched out into feature length.  This isn’t derivative at all.  There’s a beautiful sequence as characters read the forged suicide note, and we see them see their own unhappiness reflected through the prism of Kyle.  This sequence is just fantastic.  It expresses the idea smoothly, accurately, artistically.  As delusional as these characters are, it’s easy to understand why they get so taken with the legendary version of Kyle.
    This is much more palatable than God Bless America, but that might depend on who is watching.

153 - Vacancy 2: The First Cut

    A prequel to the first Vacancy, this deals with a pair of motel clerks deciding to enter the snuff video market.
    The first Vacancy is a really solid horror movie.  It’s got a 6.2 on IMDB, which is equivalent to about a 7.7 on any other genre.  I was really surprised, since I would get it mixed up with Joy Ride in my head.
    This sequel is not quite up to the tension of the first movie, since the first one played with a lot more mystery.  In this one, the villains have a much more interesting dynamic, since it focuses on two clerks, both of whom are just sleazy.  The market for the covert amateur porn they film is drying up.  A man comes to their hotel and uses the room as the setting to kill a prostitute.  The clerks confront him, and decide that they will work with him to film snuff videos, which will sell much better.
    The most interesting aspect to this is the dynamic between the clerks and the killer, as the killer takes control of the situation, makes his own rules, and winds up taking over the operation.  I wish they had gone a little further down this road, but it’s otherwise a by-the-numbers dead teenager movie.  It’s not too bad.  There are a few twists I didn’t see coming, but it’s not an especially interesting movie.
    There’s one element that surprised me, especially because it didn’t seem to have much of a purpose.  The girl is pregnant, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a reason for this.  No change to the plot.  It’s entirely backstory.
    It does make me think I might try to find the first one again.

152 - Goodbye World

    A computer virus, combined with a variety of other vague disasters results in a crumbling of American infrastructure.  A group of friends meet at an off-the-grid sustainable house to stay alive.
    Better than I expected, but still mildly disappointing.
    The approach to the disaster is interesting.  There are a lot of little bits that we see and hear, but we never understand exactly what has happened, or what has been affected.  This is a good approach to take, since it’s easier to poke holes in scenarios that you know too much about.
    What makes this movie a mixed bag is the personal relationships.  The movie is split between the apocalyptic storyline, and the personal story lines.  The interpersonal drama aspects of the story are, sadly, mostly annoying.  I never felt invested in any of them.  And I think I have a good reason for this.
    In these kinds of situations - high stress survival - most people are willing to put their personal conflicts aside.  They still argue about how to proceed, what the best course of action is, but petty dramatics about who slept with whom back ten years ago seem trivial.
    The result of this kind of dramatics is that I wind up thinking that everyone is an idiot, even if they aren’t.
    There is one strong conflict in the movie, and that’s the two military men taking charge of things.  This was a legitimately tense scenario, and I’m glad that it came to a head the way it did.  The resolution was a little too neat, and it didn’t seem entirely believable.  (Personally, I have a hard time believing that the speech she gives would persuade any others to stand down.)

    One smaller gripe that I have is the daughter.  She’s a triviality, she exists to be annoying, and she gives some motivation for a few characters at the end.  But what bothers me is that it seems incredibly irresponsible for a pair of people to raise their child out in the woods without other kids her own age.

151 - The Last Stand

    A small border town’s sheriff stands up to a drug cartel’s effort to extricate a captured boss from the US.
    I would never have watched this if it wasn’t on Netflix.
    I can’t take Schwarzenegger seriously.  I don’t know if he ever was a serious figure.  He’s easier to take seriously in comedic roles.  But even when I watched Pumping Iron, he’s a caricature.  In this, he’s actually a caricature of a caricature.
    The story is actually a fairly promising action premise, and it’s a logical continuation of modern action movie trends, rolled together with a few older cliches.  First, the villain is a drug lord.  I know it’s hard to come up with villains with reasonable motivations, but drug lords are played out.  Second, there’s the conflict between the small-town sheriff and the FBI.  What if there was an action movie where they worked together?  Where they pooled their resources effectively?  At least with this movie, the FBI doesn’t come across as completely ineffective.  They get one good arrest in.
    This movie is the logical extension of the Fast & Furious franchise.  We get a certain amount of frantic, souped-up cars driving around, ramming stuff, etc.  But we also get a vaguely western small-town showdown, but with lots more firepower and explosions.
    Schwarzenegger looks tired.  This is probably appropriate, but he actually looks a little more sad than usual.  I found myself wondering what the movie would be like if it were filmed with a different cast… and with a different director.
    The direction is usually decent.  There are some sequences that should have been really fantastic, but something about the approach to direction made them feel kind of dull.  In particular, there’s a bit where the villain turns his car around, and forces another vehicle to flip over him.  This should have been incredible.  The way it’s directed, it’s actually kind of dull.
    The script has something fun about it.  There are portions of it that feel almost like a satire of action movies.  Then there are other plot lines wedged in that feel like the result of studio interference.  The romance?  Who cares?  It’s a distraction, and it doesn’t seem to accomplish anything.
    The weirdest problem is that the big showdown at the end is nearly entirely anticlimactic.  It turns into a fist and knife fight for no reason.  And it’s not an exciting one, either.
    Isn’t it strange that Schwarzenegger is at his most imposing and impressive when he’s holding a gun, and not when he’s in a fistfight?

    One little thing that bugs me.  The villain drives his car at around 200 MPH for a pretty long time.  It seems like he would have to refuel occasionally.

150 - 127 Hours

    A guy goes on a solo wilderness adventure, and winds up getting pinned in a crevasse with his arm caught between a rock and the wall.
    This is the second time I’ve seen this.  The movie is much more interesting to Cathy, and I think I kind of see what she likes about it.
    Danny Boyle directs this, and it’s his least personal movie - at least that I’ve seen.  But I think his distance from it may have helped it transcend some of his weaknesses.  The movie is shot wonderfully.  Boyle keeps pulling tricks out of his hat, which helps keep a fairly straightforward and uneventful narrative from getting dull.
    There’s a lot of material that doesn’t actually contribute much to the story; fantasy or dream sequences in particular.  I find the other little events much more interesting.  He drops a knife, and winds up using a piece of stick (I think) held with his foot, and carefully picking the knife up and bringing it back to his reach.  It’s not a long sequence, but I find that much more engaging than the longer flights of fancy about his inner life.
    The other thing that it calls attention to is how effective Danny Boyle is at selecting music for his movies.  He goes for big, powerful, dynamic pieces that sell a sequence more effectively than a score would.  It’s more effective because he seems to be picking stuff I’ve never heard of.  Maybe it wouldn’t be as powerful if I knew it.

     Looking over Danny Boyle's film credits... somehow, Slumdog Millionaire is my least favorite.

149 - The Amazing Spider-Man 2

    Spider-Man deals with Electro, the Green Goblin, and a touch of the Rhino.
    Oh, God, why did I watch this?
    I love Spider-Man.  I have loads of his comics around the house.  I’m awfully forgiving of most of the missteps the comic took with him.  I even enjoy some of the modern comics of his!  But this movie manages to cram bad ideas on top of bad ideas.
    First, Peter Parker is the core of Spider-Man.  Peter is the reason we’re invested in making sure that Spider-Man saves the day.  In this movie, Peter is a tool.  He's not a well-meaning nerd.  He's a jerk.
    The first thing that happens in the movie is a sequence involving Peter’s parents.  This story didn’t work when they handled it in the comics, and it doesn’t work here.  It takes up the first seven minutes, and the entire time I’m wondering why I’m bothering to watch this.
    Then there’s a more real opening to the movie.  Spider-Man thwarts the theft of some radioactive material by a guy who will become the Rhino.  He manages to finish that up in time to get to his graduation ceremony and receive his diploma.  Gwen Stacy is the valedictorian, who remains on stage throughout, for some reason.  Peter steps on stage to applause, takes his diploma, and takes to the opportunity to kiss Gwen - deeply.  This is possibly the worst thing they could have chosen to do.
    I’m not just comparing against the version of Peter Parker from Amazing Spider-Man comics, based on the time that he was in high school.  Peter only got confident enough sometime in the early 90s… after he married Mary Jane.  This act makes Peter out to be an asshole.  He’s a cocky prick.  Why should I like him?  Cause he saves people?
    (To be fair, I did like a little thing during the opening where he prevents a bus from crushing some people.)
    Then we get a conversation with Gwen that seems unnatural and bad.
    Then Spider-Man swings around the city again.  This time, he flips around and wiggles in the air a lot.  This is annoying.  It’s distracting, and it just makes me think about how awkward it would be to do these things in the air.
    He helps a kid out.  I’m sure this will pay off later.
    He almost gets caught in costume by Aunt May, and delivers a terrible excuse that he’s got soot on his face from cleaning the chimney.  May tells him they don’t have a chimney.  His response is “whaaaat?”  This gag makes Aunt May into an idiot, and Peter into an idiot for using a terrible, ridiculous excuse.
    Meanwhile, at Oscorp, Max Dillon, an awkward guy, in the vein of Milton from Office Space, gets pushed around a bit at work.  He’s also fixated on Spider-Man because he was saved by him.
    We get introduced to Harry Osborn as he goes to visit a dying Norman Osborn.
    This is the first massive problem.  The movie is introducing a character that plays a major part in the movie about half an hour in.  He’s supposed to be friends with Peter.  But we have to cram Harry and Peter’s friendship, betrayal, insanity, and conversion into super-villain into an hour and a half.  That’s possible… if there weren’t other plots to deal with.  The smart thing would have been to establish Harry in the first movie, and develop him further in this one.

    You know, at this point, I’m going to just use my notes directly.
    - Colors are annoying
        This was the first thing to jump out at me.  The daylight sequences have this strange color palette, especially his costume.  I’m not sure why it is, but this set of colors just makes the computer generated work look more fake, and it becomes more obvious when they switch to a real costume.
    - Peter kisses Gwen on stage, like an asshole.
        As I’ve already said.  Completely breaks character.  I’m supposed to like and identify with this guy?
    - Twist when he jumps off buildings
        As I’ve said.
    - Chimney gag is weird
        Again.
    - Max Dillon is wrong.
        Electro was always a strange character in the comics.  He didn’t get much development until later in the canon, but one thing was notable.  He was not a bright guy.  He was a blue-collar lineman.  I liked this approach.  This version of Electro is weird.  He’s obsessive, bright, but he doesn’t seem to have an articulated reason for hating Spider-Man.  He’s just that way because it aids the plot.
    - Peter walks like an asshole through traffic.
        This is a real sticking point for me.  Peter walks into traffic to get to Gwen, and just makes a truck coming at him wait as he crosses.  I have massive, massive contempt for people who do this kind of thing.
    - After beating Electro, Peter decides to research his parents for some reason.
        This is a prime example of a script problem.  There should have been some outcome from defeating Electro.  Instead, we get a break where Peter just starts researching his parents.  Why?  What was the inspiration?  Boredom?  Nothing else to do?
    - A single cameraman feeds video to all of the screens in Times Square?
        Is this right?  This seems really weird to me.
    - The music is terrible.
        This was a problem I had with the first movie as well.  They love to insert some pop-rock stuff into these movies, and I hate it.  It takes me out of the movie, and dates the movie to a time period.  Spider-Man should be timeless, and this is the most conspicuous way of placing the story into an era.
    - Peter watches a youtube video that has no content.
        Peter decides to research how he plans to defeat Electro (since he seems to assume that he’ll have to fight him again).  This involves Peter playing a YouTube video with a scientist announcing that he’ll teach all about electricity.  The content of this video amounts to being a 20 second introduction that teaches nothing except for the idea that if too much power goes into a battery, it might explode.  Way to learn about science, Peter.
    - Aunt May resents his parents?
        May and Peter get into a weird scene where she explains how she resents her parents for leaving.  This is weird.  May is supposed to be more of a rock than a whiner.
    - Spider-Man refuses to give blood.
        This is a plot point, and it bothers me.  As a plot point, it seems desperate.  Peter’s reaction to the request is wrong.  If he were concerned about the loss of his secret identity, that would be okay.  But he claims that he doesn’t know how dangerous it would be for Harry to receive his blood.  Peter knows that Harry has all of Oscorp behind him.  I think Harry can have some tests done.
    - Secret lab?
        This is a step above the normal absurdity that this movie has.  Peter finds a subterranean secret lab that his father left behind.  Somehow, the lab has no dust, runs perfectly, and has a nice video to welcome and explain things to him.
    - Electro can disintegrate himself now?
        I suppose this is okay.  But it seems unnecessary.
    - Goblin’s transformation is annoying.
        They decided to douse the sequence with strobe lights.  I hate that crap.
    - “I hate this song!”
        During the big finish battle with Electro, there are stabs of music that imply the melody of “Itsy Bitsy Spider.”  That would have been okay, but Spider-Man saying this line is very close to breaking the fourth wall.  And that’s not a Spider-Man I want.
    - The PLANES.
        This thing was the absolute dumbest thing in the movie.  Electro has sucked all the electricity out of the city.  So now flight control can’t communicate with planes in the air.  Two planes are heading right for each other!  They’re going to collide in 4 1/2 minutes!  After hearing this, the air traffic controller tells the girl to “Clock it right now!”  She pulls out a stopwatch and starts the clock.
        So we have a literal TICKING CLOCK.
        But Spider-Man has no knowledge of it.  His goal remains exactly the same, and he would bear no responsibility if he didn’t defeat Electro in time.  This strange detour into air traffic controller-land is only there for the benefit of raising the tension for the audience.  This is the laziest, dumbest possible screenwriting possible.  This is Tommy Wiseau’s Amazing Spider-Man 2.
    - The music cues from Electro’s fight carry over into the Goblin’s fight, at least for a little bit.
        Weird.
    - Slow-mo is abused in this movie.
        I don’t mind slow-mo.  In certain cases, it can be useful, and it can communicate some tricky sequences to the audience.  In this movie, slow-mo is used to focus on selling specific images, rather than in service of the story.  Spider-Man flips around town, they toss in some slow-mo.  Spider-Man does something heroic, dab on some more slow-mo.  It hurts the tension of the movie.  I’m far less impressed with Spider-Man when I can’t tell what he’s doing.
    - Gwen’s death is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.
        I don’t expect it to be just like the comic, but I expect them to adhere to the things that made her death in the comic work.  In the comic, Gwen’s death isn’t clear-cut.  She could have been dead before she was thrown from the bridge, she could have died during the fall, or she could have died as a result of the sudden stop from Spider-Man’s webbing.  This ambiguous setup is what makes the death work.  Peter feels guilt, but it’s unclear to him if that guilt is valid.  In this movie, Gwen is clearly alive and dies as a result of his webbing.
    - Dr. Kafka?
        In the comics, Dr. Kafka was a female scientist, and a very helpful one.  She helps Spider-Man try to find cures for Vermin and a variety of other villain-types.  In this, Kafka is a sadistic male scientist.  Why would they do this?  It doesn’t help the movie.  It’s a reference for no reason at all.
    - Spider-Man retires, then returns immediately.
        Why did they do this?  Why?  This story was handled in Spider-Man 2, and handled very well.  Here, they relegate a substantial plot down to two scenes.  First, Spider-Man has disappeared.  Second, Spider-Man returns.  This is meaningless for the audience.  It creates another ending, when one was already in place.  But it does bring us to the last problem.
    - The Rhino is terrible.
        I can’t say much about the performance, since I couldn’t understand most of what he said.  But the Rhino suit is absurd.  The effects work on it looks very awkward, since it looks like he can’t possibly fit into the suit correctly.  The final confrontation has a dumb little touching moment where Spider-Man returns and persuades a little kid in a spider-costume to go back to his parents.  While Spider-Man is standing in the street, talking to the kid, the Rhino has a bunch of guns out.  He’s just standing there.  Spider-Man is being irresponsible!  Get the kid to safety!  Don’t stand in the line of fire and let him stay there!

    Now, there were a few things that I actually liked.
    - Spider-Man’s muffled voice.
        It’s a bit distracting, but it’s accurate.  I like that.
    - Near the end, they mention the Vault.
        This is very interesting.  I’m surprised that Sony got to that first, I would expect The Avengers 2 or one of the Marvel Studios movies to establish The Vault.
    - “I love you” on the bridge.
        This was actually a very nice touch.  Gwen knows it’s for her, but it could be taken as a love letter to the city from Spider-Man, which would be good.

    Let me put it this way.  I will never own this movie.  For an action, super-hero movie, I don’t think I could have been more bored.  I find this movie - and the first one - disrespectful to Spider-Man, and it derails the fantastic heroism the character encapsulates.
    Let me also make this clear - I didn’t mind Spider-Man 3.  It’s not great, but I think it’s light-years ahead of this garbage.

148 - Scream 3

    More killings start up surrounding the production of Stab 3.
    I’m going to count this as a first viewing, cause I only vaguely remember seeing Heather Matarazzo in this movie.  I’m not even sure if I saw it in theaters, since I didn’t remember anything else at all.
    I know this movie has a terrible reputation, even with fans of the Scream franchise.  Personally though, I found this one much more enjoyable than either of the first two.
    Where the first one was a little tongue-in-cheek, and the second one tried to ramp up all of the elements of the first one, this one actually does something a little different.  This one actually plays like a transition between the Scream franchise and the Scary Movie franchise.  While this doesn’t have the out-and-out satirical focus, this movie makes fun of itself.  It doesn’t name-drop other horror movies as a way of faking taking place in the real world.  The only movies that it mentions are distinctly not horror movies.
    The last act is hilariously slapstick, but it balances it carefully.  From a person looking for more horror violence, it’s an uptick in that.  From a viewer that’s a little more distanced from wanting to see this as a horror movie, it’s comic.  It reminded me a lot of Clue.
    There are a few problems that the movie has.  There are exchanges between characters that seem padded and poorly written.  I don’t know if it’s the writing though, it could just be a problem of the acting or direction.  The movie is way too long.  It’s about two hours, which would be acceptable if the central mystery was engaging.
    (This brings up another unusual issue.  In watching Scream 2, I was focused on figuring out who the killer is.  In this one, it almost seems irrelevant.  When the killer is revealed, I was disappointed that it was someone who had been introduced.  I probably would have been happier if it had been a stranger.)
    While I’m unlikely to watch this again, I’m still happier with this than I expected to be.

147 - Inception

    In an effort to implant an idea in the mind of a businessman, a group of people enter his dream state and stage a series of adventures.
    This might be the third time that I’ve seen this, and I think the novelty has started to wear off.  I’ve become a little more aware of some of the weaknesses that it has.
    The script is more awkward than it should be.  It’s a difficult plot to explain to an audience, and the result is that there’s actually more dead weight than there should be.  There’s more time spent in exposition, and reminders are scattered throughout the action.
    But it’s easy to forgive these things because of Nolan’s direction.  He has a good eye for strong kinetic energy, and he knows how to cut sequences at the right pace.  This goes a long way to making the fairly long running time feel okay.
    Where the movie takes a misstep is the personal story.  I realized that I generally don’t care about Leo’s personal problems with his dead wife.  I don’t mind a few of these scenes - like when she actually dies, and when Leo’s responsibility for it comes to light.  I don’t mind her being a factor in the dreams.  But all of the other time devoted to exploring the subplot really drags things down.  The primary plot is so much more interesting… almost like a sci-fi Mission: Impossible.

146 - Deadly Friend

    A genius kid has a fantastic robot that is destroyed.  After a girl dies, he puts a chip from the robot into the girl’s brain, which brings her back to life.
    That was a hard movie to summarize.
    This is not an especially good movie.  It’s watchable, but it also seems to have very unique problems as a result of a troubled production.  This makes it notable.
    First, the movie itself.  The direction is okay.  The budget seems to have been skewed toward the effects work, which means that some of the locations seem to be kind of sparsely decorated.  The script is clunky.  There are some tacky, forced passages of setup that scream out what they are.  There’s no nuance to the script, but this might just be because they were still aiming at a teenage audience.
    The movie is weird.  There were a variety of producers working on the movie, and they kept pulling it in different directions.  The result is that there’s an overall tone to the movie - almost a teen Frankenstein picture - but then there are a few scenes tossed in that pull away from the humanity angle, and push the movie into straightforward horror territory.  The first time one of these scenes happens, it’s confusing.  It’s an abrupt tonal shift that shifts back as soon as the scene is finished.
    The one thing that these horror scenes have in common is that they all enter the realm of humor after a stop at the level of horror.  They just push beyond that point, almost as if they were intending to be a satire of horror excesses.
    There’s one scene that’s especially memorable.

    The weirdest part of the movie is the last scene, which was obviously tacked on as an afterthought.  From what I’ve heard, the head of Warner Brothers asked that this scene be shot and added to the ending.

    This scene is really, really weird.  It’s not clear if it’s intended to be a dream sequence or not.  In either case, it doesn’t work.

145 - Along Came A Spider

    Detective Alex Cross investigates the kidnapping of a senator’s young daughter.
    One of these mystery/thriller movies I would see tiny snippets of on the college TV station.  It’s easy to get this mixed up with Kiss The Girls or The Bone Collector.  These mysteries seem to be mostly interchangeable.
    It’s dated.  It feels very dated.  The music cues feel dated, the direction feels dated, and the weird focus on technology feels dated.
    There’s some remarkably bad effects work near the beginning, which is the absolute worst time for it.  Opening with such weak work makes the whole movie feel cheaper than it probably was.
    The story itself is pretty dull.  I suppose there is a benefit to it - even though there’s a child in peril for most of the movie, she doesn’t get annoying.  (Although she does remain dumb.  She knows that her captor won’t kill her, but she stops running because the captor killed someone else?  I’d rather that the captor was just more skilled.)
    Morgan Freeman is suitably skilled, but never brilliant.  He doesn’t deduce anything especially insightful.  He’s mostly lucky, or he really takes his time figuring things out.

144 - The Incredibles

    After superheroes are banned, Mr. Incredible settles into a dull existence.  A new villain pulls him and his family out of retirement.
    This was also watched for primarily research purposes.  What I learned was that this was actually a pretty dull story.  It’s not terrible, but for plot purposes, it relied more heavily on action and gags rather than development.  Most of the arcs weren’t especially interesting.  There seemed to be a lot of similarities to The Fantastic Four (three of the powers are effectively identical, their team-up methods and behaviors are remarkably similar).  The laughs aren’t as strong as Pixar movies usually deliver.
    But the good thing is that it didn’t feel nearly as nakedly manipulative as Pixar’s movies usually feel.  By that standard, this is good.
    The biggest weakness that this movie has is the massive amount of time devoted to setting things up.  We get the pinch around 10 minutes in.  Then we get the end of the first act at about 35 minutes in.  Midpoint at around an hour in, end of second act around 1:30 or so.  Some material should have been shaved off.
    What this movie did teach was the value of useless gags.  There are a number of character moments that are simple gags.  Some of them are just a few seconds, some of them are much longer bits, but every movement of the core plot is paired with these.  It typically isn’t woven in, either, they stand distinct.
    It’s not a bad movie, but I can understand why Pixar fans felt like this wasn’t as strong.

143 - Meatballs

    A charismatic counselor works at a summer camp, befriends a lonely kid, and lots of laughs and jokes are played.
    This time, I watched this with outlining in mind.  And it wasn’t as useful as Camp Rock was, but it reinforced how unusual this movie is.  Camp Rock resulted in about 40-50 specific beats or developments.  This reached about 30.  It’s mostly a plotless movie, but there are a few small threads of plot scattered throughout.  The plot breaks down to two points.
    1.  Bill Murray befriends and encourages a young, lonely camper.
    2.  Bill Murray develops his relationship with a counselor, Roxanne.
    The second of those plots may not qualify, since it’s hard to say that much development happens.  She eventually relents to his charms, and at the end, he’s interested in her moving in with him.  But we don’t see much happen between them.  I realized that part of the problem is that we never get a sense of her personality.
    I have a feeling that about 75% of this movie was improvised.  There are scenes that are just gags, and they pad out the running time.  There were several instances where I wasn’t sure if something should count as a scene, since it had no bearing on anything else.
    Even through this lack of plot, this slice-of-life approach works very well.  It reminds me of memories of summer camp, where there was no real narrative, just a string of unrelated events.  Although, to be honest, now it makes me aware of how few of the good times I can remember.
    Specifically, I was watching this because I was looking for the Snobs v Slobs showdown at the end.  This has it, but it doesn’t seem to be as cliche as I remember.  I know Poison Ivy has a variation on it, but that won’t count.  I don’t feel like watching Heavyweights again, even though that meets my criteria.  We’ll see how this goes.

142 - Camp Rock

    A musically-inclined girl goes to Camp Rock, an arts camp, where she encounters a nice girl, an mean girl, and a dreamy rock star boy.
    This is a made-for-TV Disney movie.  It’s silly, but not as groaningly silly as Camp Cucamonga.  And it lacks the heart that makes Poison Ivy my favorite camp movie.
    I should get this out of the way.  I watched this because I had an idea for a movie that would be aimed at kids.  It would take place at a camp.  While I love camp movies, I mostly love 80s camp movies.  I haven’t seen many modern ones.  So I watched this for research.  I also took loads of notes about the structure.
    The movie itself was mostly pretty dumb.  It’s aimed at young girls, especially young fans of the Jonas Brothers, who play a substantial role in the movie.
    There’s a lot of unintentionally funny stuff going on.  In particular, for a music camp, they put a lot of focus on dancing and choreography.  No one - at least no one that I could identify - knows how to play an instrument.  (There might be an exception to this.  I think in one scene, a drummer in the background might have been actually playing)
    The villainous girl gives a fantastic performance, probably around a half hour into the movie.  It’s perfectly written.  It’s an over-the-top cocky song about how she’s so popular and no one else is as cool as she is.  It reminded me of a song that appears in The Simpsons - Privileged Boy.  It’s a hilarious song, because it requires the singer to be completely unaware of what they’re saying.
    Near the end of the movie, there are a string of performances.  There’s a dramatic ballad played by a girl with a guitar.  She doesn’t know how to play, and she doesn’t even know how to fake playing.  It’s hilariously bad.  The other performance, by our heroine, is also ridiculous, but in this case, it’s because her singing involves shaking her body around.  It’s supposed to be dramatic, but for anyone who has sung…
    The movie does have a few interesting points.  I think the villain had an interesting arc, in that the movie redeems her, while the heroine starts off okay, gets bad, and learns a lesson.  I’m still not positive why she’s really likable.
    Regardless, I learned a lot from breaking this movie down.  It’s not anything notable, but it moved quickly and it hit every note it needed to.

    One other thing.  There’s a scene where the heroine sings a little bit by herself in front of a bunch of other people.  Her singing is terrible.  Terrible!  She’s on pitch, but she’s shouting, she seems aimless… it’s terrible.

141 - The Hunger Games

    After a civil war has ruined most of the nation, a yearly battle royale happens with representatives of the children from the 12 districts.
    Based on a popular young adult book, and focusing on a plot that I should really enjoy, I’ve managed to avoid this for a long time.  At least with Netflix streaming it, my effort to see it wasn’t too high.
    I’m sorry.  It’s not as bad as I expected, but I really don’t care for it.
    While I haven’t read the book, I can tell that the movie is following it way too closely.  It takes nearly a full hour before the core of the story starts.  This isn’t a normally structured movie, and this kind of thing probably caused a certain dip for the box office.  But who cares about that?  Most of the movies I like have barely broken even!
    What bothers me about this movie isn’t so much the pacing, but it’s a collection of other missteps that make the whole thing feel weaker than it should.
    1. The world-building.
        I absolutely hate the design of the “fancy” population in the Capitol.  It’s overstated, and it doesn’t communicate opulence, at least not the way that I think the author thinks it does.  It communicates bad taste, but the existence of the games already communicates that.
    2.  The philosophy behind the games.
        This is a major failing in my mind.  I wonder if the book would be more persuasive.  In Battle Royale, the game is framed differently, and the organizers are far more brutal in their enforcement in of it.  It has much more to do with the role that government plays in Japan.  There’s a conversation in this movie that takes place between the director of the games and the president.  The president waxes philosophical about the games, talking about the importance of giving the districts a glimmer of hope, but not too much.  The director takes this in, surprised.  This is ridiculous.  In order to direct the games, he would need to have more of a working philosophy of what the games are about.  This scene could have been re-written to stage it in a more believable way, with the president mostly liking to hear himself talk, and the director kowtowing to it.
    3.  The violence is toned down.
        I can be forgiving of this.  In some cases, it’s useful to tone down violence.  At first, I thought that the violence in Avengers was toned down too much, but the more I saw it, I think they did about the right amount.  More would have been a distraction.  In this case, shying away from the violence distorts the point of the story.  The games are supposed to be traumatic and violent, not just for the participants, but the spectators.  By sanitizing them, it takes most of the power away from the idea.
    4.  It’s predictable.
        Movies are generally predictable, that’s part of why we like them.  But there’s a lesson to be learned from There’s Something About Mary - the audience should be forced to recalculate what they think will happen with every scene.  From the very beginning, there are two ways the story could end - the heroine wins and her friend dies (possibly in the process of protecting her), or the heroine wins and keeps her friend alive.  As the movie goes on, it’s clear that this thing is going for the happiest possible ending.
    Which brings up one of the things that seriously bothered me during the movie.
    5.  The lead is kept alive without being overtly violent.  This means that she gets to avoid making tough decisions, she remains unblemished.  She directly kills one person during the games, and that’s specifically in an effort to protect a young player.

    In the end, this is a modestly entertaining movie that takes a decent premise, but takes all of the material, ideas and development that might make it interesting or engaging, and eliminates them in favor of the most simplistic approach.  I’m not mad at it, and I understand why it’s popular.  It’s more palatable than Battle Royale, but that’s because it doesn’t dive into the same depths.

    (Also, a minor gripe, but I noticed during a scene with the lead and the young girl, that they make reference to it being several days.  But their skin is completely clean, their clothes are generally clean, and their teeth look perfectly clean.  I don’t ask for perfect authenticity, but would it be too much to keep her hair a bit messy or make her sweaty or something?)

140 - 21 Jump Street

    Two mostly-incompetent cops are put undercover at a high school to find the source of a new illegal drug.
    I had no real interest in seeing this movie, but as I read about the sequel, it sounded more like my kind of thing.  A very self-aware comedy.  Being self-aware is one of the keys to making a comedy work.  And this doesn’t do it quite as much as I’d like, but I suppose that hitting the same note in a comedy is a death sentence.
    This works.  It’s not spectacular, but it’s entertaining.  I did feel like there was an unfortunate flux to the strength of the material.  It started strong, the pinch was good, then it tapered down.  It went back up for the party at the midpoint.  Then it came back down for the first big chase.  The end sequence even had a bit of variation, starting a bit slow, and getting more fun as the payoffs came.
    If there’s any real weakness to this, it’s that Channing Tatum just isn’t a very captivating comedic actor.  I’ve enjoyed some of his other work, so this may have been an issue of how the character was written.
    I look forward to seeing the second one.  It’s nice to find something like this.

139 - The Den

    A graduate student, working on a project about video chat, sees a murder on a random video chat.  She becomes the next target.
    Back when I watched V/H/S, the segment that I liked the most was a Skype-based sequence.  The perspective didn’t feel forced.  Maybe it’s just because we tend to have a computer in whatever room we’re in.
    This movie takes that element and extends it much further.  This is one of the only types of found-footage movies that I think works well in this style.  In fact, the found-footage element is important to the plot.
    What makes this movie work so well is that it plays with your feelings about the found-footage style.  The story starts off normally.  At a certain point, we reach a few sequences that the audience starts to feel like they’re stretching the believability of the situation.
    The other thing that raises this movie above similar brethren is by structure.  The natural ending happens about 15-20 minutes from the end.  At that point, I wasn’t quite sure where else they could go with the story.  Then it gets blown wide open, and we start to understand why we got footage from certain points of view.
    I can’t think of many movies that work this way - where the audience feels like there’s a flaw in the storytelling, and the ending clears that up.

    There are still a few things that bug me, but they’re very small.  I don’t like the shorthand that filmmakers use to indicate a virus-infected computer.  Especially since in this case, it’s a hijacking sort of program, requiring that the computer be stable.  I don’t know how to communicate that idea without these kinds of shorthands.

138 - Captain America: The Winter Soldier

    Captain America deals with Hydra having infiltrated Shield.
    I don’t react to this movie on the same emotional level as I do the first movie, but I believe in this movie on a more intellectual level.
    I think that this movie lays plain the core issue that has been a problem since 9/11.  We increasingly reduce our freedoms in the name of security, and I don’t see a way that we can get to a sense of normalcy.  No one in a position of authority is going to choose giving more freedom in exchange for a safety.  There’s no tangible benefit to it.  We have a sense of Cap’s position, but he doesn’t get a chance to defend the position, beyond some general lip service.  In that sense, the movie fails at selling a specific point of view.  It stands with that view, but it doesn’t do much to defend it.

137 - Guardians of the Galaxy

    Peter Quill steals an artifact that leads to him being chased by and locked up with a bunch of other misfit characters.  After discovering the importance of the artifact, they make an effort to keep it out of the wrong hands.
    When Guardians was announced, I was very skeptical.  I had been aware of the comic, but I never had any interest in it.  It exists in the same reality as other Marvel comics, but it is so far removed that it doesn’t tie in with most of the lower-level heroes.  So it seemed like an odd step, since they couldn’t tie it in with many of the other movies out there.
    I’m pleased to see how this turned out.  They knew they couldn’t create a more serious movie, so they spent most of their effort on making the audience care about the characters.  The audience gets to be introduced to a few important ideas - like the existence of the Nova Corps, the Kree, a clearer explanation of the Infinity Gems.  We get another appearance by Thanos.
    (One of my only gripes about this movie is the appearance of Thanos.  He’s got too thin a waist.  I like that in the comics, he’s very bulky.  Strong, solid, and beefy in the middle.)
    It’s a very strange movie, and probably the only one I’ve seen that was structured like this.  Whenever there’s a serious moment, or a plot sequence, they interrupt it and push humor to the forefront.  It’s almost as if the movie wants the audience to ignore the plot and just have a good time.  It’s effective, but the main reason it works is because it’s carefully done.  If the humor wasn’t clever enough, the movie would crumble.  While it’s very entertaining, I’m wondering how well it will hold up to repeated viewings.  What keeps me coming back to the Captain America movies is the more serious themes.

136 - As Good As it Gets

    A compulsive, misanthropic writer gets wound into the lives of his gay neighbor and his waitress.
    I’m certain I’ve written about this movie before.  I know I’ve been clear about how much I enjoy it.  This time, I watched it for research purposes.  I’ve been writing a romance, and I know that I’m pretty light on the comedy part of things, but I wanted to see exactly how a movie like this is structured.  So this time, I made an outline of the movie, focusing on the way that the plot and character development worked.
    What I realized was actually that the movie has a few traits that I had a hard time getting past.  I counted about 45-46 scenes.  For the amount of time spent focusing on Carol the waitress, I would expect more development, but she actually doesn’t learn much.  She mostly learns that Melvin isn’t entirely a jerk.  But she remains a jerk throughout.  In fact, later in the movie, she handles much smaller things much worse.  When Melvin grumbles that the restaurant requires him to wear a jacket and tie, and they let her in wearing a housedress, she’s somehow seriously offended and ready to leave.  The comment wasn’t nice, but it wasn’t specifically mean to her.  She’s had plenty of experience with Melvin by that point, and should probably be able to handle his mistake more smoothly.  She handles much worse behavior during that scene perfectly fine.  Regardless, in response to this, she demands a compliment.
    Is she supposed to be torn because Melvin is attractive, and kind sometimes, and a jerk other times?  I don’t get a sense of her personal conflict.  I get a sense that she is only attracted to his generosity, but she makes no reasonable effort to train Melvin to be a good person.
    In watching it while taking these notes, I realized that the first act is a story of his relationship with the dog, at least primarily.
    What stands out on repeated viewings is that the last act is pretty weak.  The writing remains good, but the roadblock to their relationship is so forced.  It requires her acting unreasonable, even in the face of Melvin behaving better and better.  It requires her being more and more of a jerk on her own.
    What makes this movie work, and work really well, is that every scene has a joke to it.  Even the more serious scenes have substantial laughs in them.